


By way of shaking hands

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, FRUMPKIN IS NOT HARMED IN THIS FIC, First Meetings, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gen, animal death mention (though not the actuality), musings on Nott's past, vague implied alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 23:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15035327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Thrown into a jail cell, alone and without hope, Nott wakes to the purring of a cat. There's another prisoner there, and she's not quite as alone in the world as she thinks she is.





	By way of shaking hands

Nott’s hands were shaking, as she sat shackled and alone in the cold jail cell. She felt too hot and too cold at once, trembling with nervous energy, twitching with it. This dark place… even though it was only a town lawmaster’s holding cell, it was too much like that other dungeon, the one that had echoed with the screams that still sounded in her head when she was all alone, especially on nights like this.

She felt restless, driven to move instead of sitting still. The shackles on her wrists and ankles were too big for her – perhaps they were made for a halfling, or a dwarf – but not big enough that she could slip them over her hands and feet. The rusted metal clinked a little as she shivered. She should relax, she knew. It was fine, everything would be all right as long as it wasn’t _them_ that had caught her, the ones who were surely hunting her. She would get out at some point. She would break out, and if she couldn’t break out then maybe they would let her out eventually. When they needed this place to hold someone else, maybe. Surely they had to.

Her mind swam, her thoughts a confused tangle. She had only been trying to steal that pretty bottle, with the cherry wine to still the trembling in her fingers. Strong and sweet, a respite from the unforgiving world and the path she had chosen.

She had been careless. Still, she could get out, she forced herself to think. She ran her fingers along the walls of her cell, as high as she could reach, checking for any loose stones. There were none. There was a high, barred window, that let in a tiny sliver of wintery moolight. But she wasn’t tall enough to reach it even if she stood on the rough timber bench, and the walls were, as far as Nott could tell, too smooth to climb. 

Her hands were frozen, shaking, and she clasped them together to still them, watching her breath mist out in clouds in the chilly silver moonlight. They would let her out some day; they had to. They might take a finger or two – was that the punishment for theft here? Maybe. That might not be so bad. At the very least she didn’t think they would execute her. Though maybe such leniency didn’t apply to goblins.

At least here there was doubt, though. Back where she had come from she would be dead already for even the smallest of crimes, that much she knew for sure.

So she was lucky, really, she knew. She was just blowing on her fingers, rubbing them to try to bring some feeling back to them, when she heard a sound.

A clattering of chains, somewhere around the corner, outside the cell. Voices, raised in anger, the sound of something smashing and a shout. There was brief silence then, and she was alone with her thoughts for a while more.

Then there came a light. Immediately, Nott tensed; there was someone coming outside the barred cell door, a burly dwarf holding a lantern. Beside her was another guard, a thickly musceled human with a scarred face, dragging a prisoner in chains like Nott’s towards the cell door. She kept her eyes lidded and shrank into the corner, all the while watching the two guards. Any slip they made, any moment of inattention, she had to be ready to seize as an opportunity. Her eyes flicked to the ring of keys at the lantern guard’s belt; could Nott charge her, snatch it away and slip past, before they caught her?

Probably not, she thought. Especially the slipping past part; the two guards as well as the prisoner seemed to take up most of the door. Her hands and feet were shackled together; it was hopeless.

Still, she couldn’t do nothing. There is was again, that restlessness, that _itch_. She had managed to run away, hadn’t she? It couldn’t end like this.

And after all, she wasn’t shackled _to_ anything, was she? Only to herself, hand to hand, foot to foot.

And so, as the guards opened the door, Nott was ready. At the first possible moment she was springing forward as fast as the shackles would allow, hand reaching out to the keys, one last desperate dash to the door, to freedom…

Or not. Her grab for the keys went wide as a heavy hand lifted her by the scruff of her neck, arms and legs flailing several feet off the ground. A snarl of contempt, as the guard just held her there, kicking and hissing and hurling curses, as tears of frustration came to her eyes.

The guard spat at her, flinging her bodily back into the cell a moment later. The last thing she saw was the other prisoner’s eyes flicking towards her, two points reflecting the orange flame of the lantern, before her head struck the back wall of the cell and her vision exploded into stars, then went immediately black.

 

By the time Nott awoke, the grey-pale light of a cold dawn was filtering in through the window. Even that, though, was too much, for as she came to consciousness pain and nausea came washing over her in sickening waves. She was half-numb with cold, beyond the point of shivering, and her shackles had bitten into her wrists and ankles. Her stomach was aching with hunger and her mouth tasted sour and dry.

For a while she simply lay there on the cold, filthy floor, her face pressed against it. After a while though, she became aware of something new; a warm, damp something against her cheek. Something was licking her, lapping at her cheek with a rough tongue, she realised. As soon as she thought this, she heard it; a soft rhythmic… _purring_? Nott frowned, against the cold floor. _It was almost like-_

_-A cat?_ She sat up, then groaned as the dizziness came once more, then squinted and frowned. She blinked a few times, but the cat did not go away. It was ginger and striped, rather scruffy looking, staring up at her for a while. Then it seemed to lose interest, turning aside and beginning to lick its paw, tail flicking unconcernedly back and forth.

Nott frowned, looking up. It must have come through the window. The bars were probably about widely spaced enough for a cat to fit through. _Maybe_. Very likely not wide enough for a goblin, though. She could go up on the bench and take a look, she thought, but the other prisoner was lying sprawled across all of it. _Rude_ _not to share_ _, really, but then she_ _was…well, who she was_.

She couldn’t see much from her corner anyway; she could see a pair of battered boots protruding over one end, the hem of a coat that was more holes than actual cloth trailing down onto the cell floor. When she craned up a little, she didn’t get much more; the other prisoner was a human man, or at least a humanoid one; she couldn’t see much of a face for the one shackled arm that was flung over it, except for a bit of a scruffy beard, a little blood from a split lip crusted in it at one side. He seemed to be unconscious, or asleep.

Not that she cared much. The only reason that she might have to would be if her cellmate had anything she could steal, but by the looks of him, even that seemed unlikely. And she knew not to trust humans, for they would usually attack her on sight.

(Quite understandable, she thought.)

She sighed, trying to turn around and prop herself up with her forehead against the wall so she didn’t have to see the light from the window; it was still too bright for her, and she pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes closed against it. Her head hurt. Actually, her whole body hurt. She could barely feel her fingers and toes for the cold, but somehow they hurt too. Her stomach hurt especially, both hungry and nauseous at the same time.

Behind her, the cat meowed.

Nott made a soft whining sound, ignoring the cat, though it came to nuzzle at her elbow. She frowned. Maybe if there were cats here, there were rats… she could really go for a rat right now, even one of the skinny ones that usually lived in places like this. But she couldn’t hear any rats. Maybe the cat was too good at its job, she thought vaguely.

Her stomach growled painfully.

And then she had an idea. Slowly, Nott turned to the cat, stretching out a hand silently. The cat looked back at her with wide, unblinking eyes, whiskers twitching.

Nott waited a little longer, preparing. Then, she struck, bared teeth and claws going for the cat’s throat. Rats were easier to catch than cats, but right now she didn’t have many options.

Nott’s eyes closed as she went in for a perfectly timed bite, as she anticipated tasting blood between her teeth. But instead, her jaw slammed painfully closed on nothing, simply a mouthful of air. She snarled, her eyes flashing open to see where the cat had gone; it hadn’t had anywhere to go, so how had she missed it?

She blinked, looking around the cell. The cat had vanished.

Confused, Nott dragged herself to her feet with an effort; she was a little frightened. Cats were quick, yes, but she was usually quicker… had the blow to the head really slowed her that much? Or was she seeing things that weren’t there now?

A quick search of the cell made her think the latter. There was no cat hiding under the bench; she even stealthily lifted up the trail of the prisoner’s coat to look. The window was too high, she would surely have seen it jump all that way. Same with the barred door; the cell was small, but surely not even a cat could move so fast.

And so, she was at a loss. Not that it mattered, really. Either way, the cat had gotten away from her. She sighed, leaning back against the wall and toying with the shackle on her wrist, shaking it back and forth so that the light from the window played against the rusted iron. It wasn’t very shiny at all, which was disappointing. Nothing to distract her from her mind flicking back over her last few conscious memories before waking up. Being thrown in here and left alone. Trying to charge the guards. The one who had picked her up and held her. She suddenly remembered the last thing she had seen before the world had gone dark; two pinpricks of light, reflections of the lantern in that prisoner’s eyes just before she had been thrown against the wall.

She looked over at him again, for lack of anything else to occupy her. This time she was bolder, more certain that he would not wake if he hadn’t already. She crept up beside his head.

Up close, he was younger than she had thought at first. It wasn’t like Nott was good at telling non-goblin ages, but she supposed he would have some grey in his hair if he was older, and his was a dirty sort of orange-brown. Not that dissimilar from the cat she had seen, she thought vaguely, without quite knowing why she had made the connection.

On closer inspection, she saw that he did indeed have the strange, round little ears that humans had – how they could hear much of anything with those, Nott never knew - so she supposed that settled that question. Beyond that, there was nothing much to tell about him; he didn’t seem to have anything beyond the clothes he was wearing, which were too big for  her and too full of holes to sell to anyone. She supposed she could wear the coat like a cape for a scant bit of extra warmth if she could get it off him – probably impossible in itself, but then there was still the issue of getting out of this cell without attracting attention. She frowned, running her hands lightly over the pockets of his coat; there was nothing in any of them, it seemed, so that was that.

She was about to turn away and go back to sitting in the corner, when her gaze caught on something actually interesting; a leather cord around his neck. Her eyes widened; she couldn’t see what was on the end of it, because it was tucked inside the front of his stained shirt, but the way he was wearing it looked like the way that people wore jewellery.

She couldn’t help it. Cautiously – taking exquisite care so that her shackles didn’t make a sound - Nott extended her hand, taking hold of the cord and tugging ever so gently. She felt it stick for a moment, then felt a weight on the end of the cord, beginning to slide against his skin. She didn’t even necessarily want to take it, she told herself; if they had let him keep it in the cell, then it was probably useless, of no value. But in that moment, as usual she was seized by a sudden curiosity; she wanted to _see_.

And in another moment, she did; she pulled out from under his shirt what looked like some sort of amulet, made of rust-coloured stone set in dull iron, with some sort of rune or symbol that she didn’t understand inscribed on it. But Nott didn’t care about any of that; she cared only about how the light played on the surface of the polished stone.

She wanted it. It was like it always went; she saw something, she wanted it, she wouldn’t be able to think straight until she had taken it. She flexed her fingers, clasping and unclasping her grip. There it was again, that _itch_. She knew that it wasn’t useful in her current predicament. But she also knew that once the itch was gone - once she had the shiny pendant - then she’d be able to think straight again, and then she might be able to do something.

And really, what harm could it do?

Nott looked down at the sleeping man for a while. He _seemed_ to be passed out, unresponsive, but you never could tell as easily with humans. She couldn’t see his face for his arm slung across it, and that made her a little more anxious.

Still, it wasn’t exactly hard; she had stolen from people who were awake before, and gotten away with much more than this. Really, this man was lucky that she hadn’t robbed him for everything he had already. Or worse, she thought. That was probably what he would expect her to do, what the whole world expected her to do.

Instead, she was doing this. Nott’s hand was already there, halfway to the front of his shirt. She would untie the leather cord, she decided. That would be less likely to wake him.

She stretched out her hand, letting it rest above his chest for a moment, rising and falling with his breath as he slept.

And then, quite out of her control, her fingers trembled once again. It made the shackle clatter, the sound like a too-loud alarm in the taut stillness. She flinched at the sound, which made the clattering louder. A moment later though, she was yelling out in fear as man was suddenly awake and moving, and a hand shot out and clasped around her outstretched wrist.

Then everything moved very fast. Before Nott knew quite what had happened, the man was clasping the amulet in one hand and Nott’s wrist in the other, lifting her fully into the air as he leaped to his feet, motions violent and fierce. She nearly screamed as he lifted her, but then the sound died in her throat as she caught sight of his eyes, just a momentary glimpse as he spun her around and dropped her on the floor. They were blue, a perfectly ordinary human colour, and still unfocussed as the tail ends of a dream left him.

But in that instant, Nott found them terrifying; they seemed to burn with desperation and fury, with something torn and ragged and hurting, exposed to the world, _and didn’t she know that look when she saw it?_

Not that she had much time to look, for a moment later he dropped her and she fell on her hands and knees – painfully, again – but this time was able to scramble up, turning around to face him. When she did he had a fistful of fire, flaring high and crackling, distoring her view of his face as the heat rolled off it towards the ceiling. The other hand clutched the amulet at his throat like a lifeline, as he stared down at her with wild panic in his gaze, eyes like open wounds.

But only for a moment, though it felt to Nott like a fearful eternity as she waited for his fire to fall upon her.

But it didn’t; she realised it was only moments later when the man’s eyes cleared a little, his mouth falling slightly open and the fire in his hand dissipating into the air. He still clutched the amulet, close to his chest, his knuckles white as he gripped it. For a moment he simply stood there staring at her, as horror and disgust came; that, at least was familiar. Usually when people saw her face for the first time, they looked like that.

But no, Nott realised; this was something different. To her surprise, she did not think the horror on his face was in response to seeing hers. Quite the opposite, in fact; she seemed to be almost looking _through_ her, as though at something she couldn’t see. He seemed to be looking at something very far away.

Nott looked behind her, uneasily, but there was only solid wall. When she looked back, the man was still staring fixedly at her, but now he was tucking the amulet back in his shirt once more. His shackles were clattering, and Nott realised that he was shaking worse than she was as he dropped his gaze to his hands. He was staring at his palms, eyes wide and bloodshot, haunted. “I…I… I’m sorry…” he managed to stammer out, as he stumbled backwards quickly to the bench, sat down on it. He looked badly shaken, as though if he had not sat down his legs would have given way beneath him anyway. “I…” he dropped his gaze to his hands, reddish hair falling in a stringy curtain over his face. “I didn’t mean to do that. I thought…” his breaths were shaky, so she could barely understand what he was saying, and it didn’t help that he had a some sort of an accent that she didn’t recognise. “I must have been dr-dreaming. I…” he seemed greatly relieved for a moment. “I th-thought…I was somewhere else. I mean, I-I thought you were someone else.” He raised his head, and she saw that he was crying, tears rolling down his cheeks and making clean tracks in the dirt on his skin. He pressed his hands together within the shackles, bowing his head before her as though asking for forgiveness. “But even so, I shouldn’t have done that. That was… unforgiveable of me” he said. “I do not deserve…” he broke off, taking another shaky breath, seeming to stop there and make an about turn. “I am sorry” he said, pressing his eyes closed, and breathed out. “I’m sorry.” He repeated it over and over again, so low she could only just hear.

Nott let out her breath too, almost as disturbed by this outpouring as she had been with the initial shock. “I’m… sorry I woke you” she said, tentatively. “I didn’t mean to…”

The man looked up at her again, with searching eyes. She wondered if he had worked out that she had been trying to steal from him. If he hadn’t, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him. At least the itch had passed for now, startled out of her by the racing of her heart. But more so by his eyes.

For in that moment, she realised, he had reminded her in a passing flash of the torturer she had worked for; those had been goblin’s eyes, and this man was human, but there was…a touch of something, just for a moment. A moment later Nott had dismissed the idea though; it must be the last of his dream, and only that.

Dreams could be that way; after all, in her dreams she was cruel sometimes, and all the things she’d seen, all the things she’d done or let happen came out to dance. If there was anyone who could judge people based on what they dreamed, it was not her.

And if for a moment he had reminded Nott of the torturer, now, she realised, he reminded her of no one so much as his victims. His face now was their screams but silent, and again she felt the old familiar dread, the guilt. She had tried, she had tried to be better. But in the end, she didn’t know if she had made any difference at all. She had saved one life – she hoped, perhaps – but surely things carried on just the same without her, back where she came from.

She must have been lost in thought, staring blankly at him, for a moment later he was tilting his head to one side, peering at her. Again though, it was not like the way that most people looked at her; she couldn’t place it, but something was different about this man. He wrung his hands in his lap, as though reflexively going to touch something that wasn’t there. “Ah…you…you haven’t seen a cat around, have you?”

For a moment, Nott was too startled to speak; whatever she had been expecting him to say next, it wasn’t that. “I…yes, actually” she managed after a while. “…Why, did you want to eat him?” Privately, she didn’t think that this man had it in him to catch a cat that she couldn’t, but it wasn’t like she was going to tell him that. Besides, he had already surprised her several times.

The man’s eyes went wide with shock at her words. “… _Nein_! Ah… certainly not! That cat is my familiar, whose name is Frumpkin.” he explained, clearly disturbed. “But why would you ask if I wanted to eat-”

“No reason! Don’t worry about it!” squeaked Nott, interrupting him. After a moment she added, “b-but…yes. There was a cat, here.” she gestured. “It…ah… disappeared, though.”

“Ah! I _thought_ I was capable of doing that in my sleep. Thank you for the confirmation.”

Nott blinked, completely lost now. Whoever this man was, the lines of logic he seemed to follow were very strange to her.

In answer to her silent question his eyes rose to meet hers, and suddenly he smiled, snapping his fingers in front of him. Nott braced for more fire, but instead there was a soft flash of light. A moment later she gasped; there, sitting in his lap, was the cat. Immediately his fingers were buried in ginger fur as the cat began to purr deeply, reaching up to put a paw on his shoulder. As Nott watched, a small pink tongue came out to lap at the dried blood on his face.

The man frowned, brows drawing together as he wiped the blood crusted on his lip on his sleeve, inspected it for a moment, then grimaced and began rooting through his pockets without another glance at Nott. It was like he had forgotten she was there.

For her part, she had almost entirely forgotten the pain she had been in earlier; her mind was racing as she tried to get some sort of read on this strange individual. After a while the silence dragged on until it grew awkward and heavy between them, but the man made no move to break it.

Nott shuffled her feet. “So…” she tried to smile. “You’re…awake now… in a prison cell…”

“Yes, I…I am awake…now. And I am…” his words were stiff and guarded again, as he looked around the small cell, “…where I am, _das ist wahr_.” He looked almost relieved, but Nott could not imagine why.

But before she could ask, he immediately got back to rummaging through his pockets, cursing softly in a language she didn’t understand when he seemed to find nothing.

At last, Nott’s curiosity got the better of her. “Excuse me” she said, and the man raised his head. “Are you… are you some sort of mage?” She faltered, her voice dropping. “Ah… I mean, I saw your cat do…” she mimed snapping her fingers, “… _that_ , and I saw you make that fire earlier…” she broke off huriedly, as he froze, Frumpkin arching his back and hissing beside him as the man went tense too.

“Why…why do you ask…?”

“I’m just…interested in…” she sighed. “I guess what I meant to ask is… do you…ah, do you know how to turn…things… into other things?”

He looked up at her, a calculating sort of look on his face. He seemed to be choosing his words with caution, his fingers suddenly tightening a little as they carded through Frumpkin’s fur. “Ah…I can do such things, on occasion, _ja_.”

Nott’s heart twisted in her chest; she remembered a chemist, who could turn things into other things; he had been good and kind. He had cared about her. And, stupid though it might be, she felt somehow that this man – strange and inexplicable though he might be – was somehow not too different. She took a deep breath, and, for once, threw aside her caution entirely. Her words came in a rush, tumbling over each other. “Will you… will you teach me some?”

His eyes widened once more; suddenly, she realised he was probably even younger than she had realised. A moment later though, the vulnerability was gone his face closed over once more. “ _Nein_ ” he said, stiffly. His entire posture was different now, shoulders hunching forward. “I cannot do that.”

Nott let out her breath, disappointment hitting her hard. She twisted her hands together regretfully. For a moment there, she had allowed herself to hope…maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe trusting this man was a mistake. And yet, she couldn’t just stop there. “Why not?”

He turned back to look at her, and there was a frown on his face now, brows knitted together. “Because it is dangerous for me to do so” he said. “And… because I…have something else I need to do.”

“What?”

“I… I cannot say. I’m sorry.” He looked almost genuinely apologetic, and so, so deeply sorrowful it almost shocked her. But there was something else there, intermingled with the sorrow; a deep, churning firestorm, anger keeping hot within. “But it will be a grand undertaking. I will require a great deal of time, and a lot of books, and many rare materials probably, and…” he clutched his hands to the sides of his head. “I will require…to be left alone.”

“W-well…” Nott laughed, a little nervously. “That doesn’t sound like something that you can do from inside this cell, does it?”

But once more, he had smoothed over his face after a mere moment, looking up at her and pursing his lips, halfway to a tense smile. “No, I suppose I cannot.”

“What if…” she bit her lip. “What if you could escape from here?”

He narrowed his eyes, giving a bitter laugh. “A nice question, but without my spell components I’m about as likely to escape from this place as you are.” He dropped his face into his hands, hair falling over his face once more. Frumpkin rubbed up against him, and he took the cat onto his lap, hands moving through the fur reflexively.

“What about your cat?” asked Nott, choosing not to tell him that actually, she thought she was slightly more likely to escape this place than he was as things currently stood. “Frumpkin can get in and out. I saw, before.”

“True, but a cat cannot open a door and let me through! I can spy through Frumpkin’s eyes, but…” he shook his head, that haunted look starting to edge back into his eyes. “I can’t do more than that, I fear.”

Nott raised her eyebrows, incredulous, looking between cat and man. “You can _spy through his eyes_? That’s amazing!”

“Well, yes, but…”

“And you can change things into other things, correct?”

“As I said, on occasion…”

“…Can you make a lockpick?”

“…Maybe? But I don’t know how to make one, let alone use one…”

Nott actually smiled then, showing all her teeth. “Well, I do.”

He blinked, surprised. “You do?”

“Yes! I know how to do all those things. The only reason I haven’t escaped already is because of these.” She raised her shackled wrists. “But if we were out there, I could steal the key from right under the guard’s noses. I…we…could leave them locked up in here, then skip town. Go learn more magic, and whatever it is you want to do. If you need money for your…uh… magic stuff, we could get that too!”

“I would like nothing less than to break the boundaries of what is possible with magic, at the current time”

“….Ambitious, but we can work on it.”

“Yes, I am going to.”

“Of course, anything you like. But the point is, between the two of us, we can leave here.”

He looked, for the first time, lost for words. “Oh. Ah, _ja_ , so you are saying…a sort of…collaboration? That might work…”

“Of course it will work!” In that moment, Nott realised that she believed it whole-heartedly. With someone like him close by, she felt hope such as she had not felt in years, if ever. “I…I know it’s hard, but… I’m asking you, for just a little while, to trust me.” And with that, Nott extended a hand into the space between them.

He balked a little at those words, still guarded. “Before I agree to this…tell me who you are, and what you want. I still don’t know your name, even.”

“My name’s Nott. I am…” she swallowed, a little nervous suddenly “…I am a goblin, and I know how to lie and steal and do things that will probably get me into prison again, a lot of times even. But what I want is…” stared into the distance for a while, thinking. Then she took a deep breath, looking him right in the eye. “I want to become someone different. Someone… someone better.”

For a long time, he simply stared back at her, many expressions flitting across his face, too fast for her to read. Then, to her surprise, he smiled and reached out a hand to take the one she had reached out to him, clasp it and shake. “Well, my name is Caleb Widogast, and…I think, yes, I think, Nott, that we might be able to work together.”

**Author's Note:**

> Small note on the timeline of this: I'm not exactly clear on how long passed between Caleb getting out of the asylum and meeting Nott in jail... I've seen people headcanon it as being really soon after, but as far as I can see it's never canonically stated? So I'm going with "he spent a few years on his own before meeting Nott, struggling to survive, making vague magical plans but not having sneaky skills/self-belief/focus/stability to implement them until Nott came into his life". Partly because in my mind that makes it a better dynamic, that Nott was able to teach him as much as he taught her. But also because I feel like "Caleb who has just got out of the asylum" is a whole different and also much more upsetting characterisation than this one, that I am not sure I want to touch just yet :((((  
> Anyway, this is only my second fic in the fandom so my characterisations might change in future, and of course if I have got the timeline wrong re: any other canonical information we have, I guess we can consider this an AU :')   
> Either way, hope you enjoyed this!! I love these two and their dynamic.....


End file.
